YouTube And Video Sharing

Written by Susan Esterbill

Ever heard of the saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words?” Well, YouTube is proving that videos are worth more than pictures. Millions of people worldwide upload their clip to the site and let it be seen and commented upon by the rest of the internet citizenry. It is comparable to blogging, except you use videos instead of articles - now it's called vlogging.

How YouTube Works

Members can upload their video clips to the site. These videos could be about anything under the sun. Videos uploaded vary among movie clips, TV clips, music videos, live shows, sports events, and homemade videos.

Everyone who has internet connection and Adobe Flash video playing capability can watch the video clips on the site and leave a comment for the member who submitted the video. Visitors of the site can also post or embed the videos they like in their own web site by copying the prominently displayed codes. This perpetuates video sharing and increases the following of both YouTube and YouTube members.

YouTube’s Impact

YouTube is a product of three Paypal employees’ fertile imaginations. These three had personal video sharing in mind when they began YouTube. They could never have foretold that YouTube was going to be a premier cyberspace entertainment site.

YouTube’s concept is pretty simple. Maybe this is the reason for its enormous popularity in the short span of time that it has been in operation. The period 2005 to 2006 (YouTube’s first year in cyberspace) saw such rapid growth in membership and web traffic; it is even more popular than MySpace by some measures. About a hundred million video clips get viewed on YouTube every day. Google realized YouTube’s impact on the internet and acquired it for an amount in excess of US$1 billion.

YouTube can make celebrities out of ordinary, average people. People who have had no way of entering show business the traditional way get a start on YouTube. Comedians get a following, home-styled commentators get an airing, and everybody gets to share his thoughts and get reactions from viewers.

Bands and television shows get promoted through YouTube. In fact, NBC and CBS have come to acknowledge YouTube’s power to reach millions of potential viewers and have agreed to provide YouTube content from their TV shows. Recording companies followed suit by providing music videos.

YouTube’s Unresolved Issues

Of course, where there is video sharing, there’s copyright infringement. YouTube has received numerous complaints and some lawsuits from rightful owners of videos which found their way to the site through pirated copies or copies whose license did not include sharing through the internet.

YouTube is still trying to sort things out. The site has set 10 minutes as the maximum video clip length to discourage posting whole copyrighted videos, but so far this has been quite ineffective. Some keywords associated with copyright content are also automatically rejected but users have got around this by misspelling their keywords or using different keywords altogether.

Whatever the issues that YouTube are facing and are about to face in the future, it has proven its significance in the social networking field of the internet. It will continue to be a primary source of entertainment for the cyberspace populace.

About the author:

Susan Esterbill is a web junkie who enjoys posting positive videos at VidMission.com.